Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has threatened the largest newspaper in his home state of Nevada for publishing a series of critical articles and editorials as he seeks a fifth term in the U.S. Senate.

The veteran Democratic lawmaker threatened economic punishment in retaliation for the negative coverage and told a senior executive at the paper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, that he hopes it goes out of business. Over the weekend the newspaper’s publisher wrote a piece calling the senator’s remarks a full-on threat perpetrated by a bully who has forgotten that he was elected to office to protect Nevadans, not sound like he’s shaking them down.

The publisher points out that Reid’s behavior is not becoming of a man who is the majority leader in the U.S. Senate and that it absolutely is not what anyone would expect from a man who now asks Nevadans to send him back to the Senate for a fifth term. “If he thinks he can push the state’s largest newspaper around by exacting some kind of economic punishment in retaliation for not seeing eye to eye with him on matters of politics, I can only imagine how he pressures businesses and individuals who don’t have the wherewithal of the Review-Journal,” the publisher writes.

Reid is evidently worried that the paper’s coverage of his numerous mishaps and all-time low approval ratings will cost him reelection next year. Recent news stories have documented the senator’s wasteful earmarks and exorbitant spending of tax dollars as well as statewide polls revealing that more than half of Nevada voters have an unfavorable view of him.

The paper’s recent editorials have also blasted Reid who is tight with President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. One editorial claims that reelecting Reid will keep the federal welfare flowing into recession-ravaged Nevada and help the 2011 Legislature continue to expand state government despite the private sector’s inability to sustain it. Another points out that being the face and voice of an increasingly statist, job-killing liberal agenda has exacted a political toll for Reid

The senator has also been embroiled in a series of corruption scandals in the last few years by using his influence to help a mob-connected developer secure a lucrative Las Vegas land deal in exchange for campaign contributions and a $1.1 million profit he concealed from the public. He was also involved in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, taking tens of thousands of dollars from the jailed lobbyist’s Indian tribe clients and refusing to return the tainted money by claiming that “Abramoff was a Republican operative and this is a Republican scandal.”